Step 7: Soldering

Step 8: The finished remote

Finally i've cut out some labels for the volume buttons. Mission accomplished!

My Parents own this old CRT TV from 1998. Over the years i often had to clean and repair the original TV remote, until the point it wear out completely. TV remotes often suffer from grease, human sweat or battery leakage which attack the sensitive pcb. So i bought a cheap universal remote, which then lasted for 3 years. Then i figured out, that my parents would only use the Volume-, Channel- and Power- buttons. The first idea was to built a durable remote out of a piece of wood, with wooden buttons and stuff, until i stumbled over an old 2-button-remote, which is used on construction sites, small cranes or elevators, on a flea market. Anyway, first i had to figure out, how to mount 3 additional buttons.

Step 1: Disassembly

While dissembling the industrial remote, i noticed, that the actual switches were missing. Also the top socket was originally used for a small light bulb. Most of the bottom surface part of the "brick" remote had to be removed with a dremel tool.

Step 2: Power Button

I decided to use the light-bulb-socket for my custom made power button. For the knob i took a button from an old sweater, which could easily fit inside the socket, and painted it red varnish. The switch with the spring came from old pcb parts. Both parts, the switch and the knob had to be stabilized with a small tube in between and glued together. To fix it to the socket i used some mounting sockets from old PC casings. a small screw and lots of hot glue.

One last thing - I wouldn't have used the original remote's circuit, because sometimes the circuit itself can have problems. I would have put a microcontroller in there - probably an 8-pin picAXE or something - to do the IR transmitting. That way, you can broadcast at higher power, you have the added bonus of being able to change it to work with different types of TVs (even universal remotes don't work with every TV - you still have to dig out/look up the manual to figure out how to configure it to work with different ones), and you can program the remote to behave certain ways when needed. For instance, my TV has a problem that every time I turn it on, it turns closed captions on, so I would program it to turn them off every time I turn the TV on.

I would've just got a single 9 volt battery and used that, rather than cutting out the battery box from the old remote, which, on an old remote, is often half the reason the remote isn't good anymore (no battery cover, broken/bent contact springs, corrosion, etc).

I heart this! My husband is a geek - has lots of remotes, but even with bifocals, it takes him 10 minutes to find the mute button! I would love to make one of these (with a few more buttons) for him... great idea. Thanks for sharing it!